NSA Data Center the Focus of Tax Controversy 120
Nerval's Lobster writes "Location is everything when choosing the site of a data center. Firms such as Microsoft and Google and Facebook spend a lot of time looking into the costs of land, power, regulation and taxes before placing their respective data centers in a particular place. Sometimes, that local tax bill comes into play in a big way. Just ask the National Security Agency which learned it faces a multimillion-dollar annual state tax on the power consumed by its new data center in Camp Williams, south of Salt Lake City. The Salt Lake Tribune obtained a series of email exchanges between the feds and the state, with the NSA protesting a $2.4 million tax on its annual power expenditure, pegged at about $40 million. Harvey Davis, director of installations and logistics for the NSA, sent a letter (subsequently quoted by the newspaper) to state officials that made the logistics argument: 'Long-term stability in the utility rates was a major factor in Utah being selected as our site for our $1.5bn construction at Camp Williams. HP325 [the new law] runs counter to what we expected.'"
This would be the data center William Binney et al claim is logging almost all domestic communication.
Cry me a river... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Speaking of power (Score:2, Interesting)
40 million power bill.
The power bill on the Titan is 9 million.
So about 4 computers the size of the Titan.
I doubt if that's enough to capture the whole internet.
Re: Robbing Peter to Pay Paul (Score:3, Interesting)
Where have you seen an engineering project that was (a) completely finished and (b) on schedule? A "Hello, World," perhaps, in Perl?
By law, the government has to give the contract to the lowest bidder. Not the best one, and not the most honest, but to the lowest one. This means that the contractors *have* to bid low, and hope to make it up later on, during the contract. Some contracts (cost plus) allow that. A contractor who bids exact or a little over does not get the job. Fair and honest estimates are bred out of government contracting by laws.
Re:wtf (Score:3, Interesting)
I sometimes practice self censorship too. However, other times I think back to 1776, and how the founders of this great nation wouldn't stand for their unfair treatment: I'm 99% sure they started a Revolution Instead! (I wasn't there, so there's at least a 1% chance the history books are lying). Then, I make innocuous posts including words like, "Give me Liberty, or Give me Death," which showed real courage and are thought to trigger the anti-establishment or anarchy detection filters -- Purely for the express purpose of creating a false flag in their data... Signal to noise, and all that.
Sure, this plan could blow up in my face one day like a hand grenade, or improvised explosive but I'm hoping for one of those inflatable rafts that some Cubans try to float here on instead. I'd rather risk going to jail on trumped up charges as a martyr for free speech than let fear strip away my first amendment rights -- I'm not just giving them up! You'll have to pry them from my cold dead hands. I mean, Big Brother isn't really watching everything you do online in real time; They might record it, but have to look it up after the fact to discover your terrorist ties if you did anything crazy. It doesn't work preemptively, the Boston Bombing showed us that. You're appealing to a computer algorithm, if anyone, and really all you've done is get yourself on their radar. Might as well say what you think instead.
The ultimate weapon against such spying would be a thesaurus!